Dutch order recall of French horse meat

PostedJan. 24th, 2014

AMSTERDAM, The Netherlands (Reuters) — Dutch food safety authorities have ordered five Dutch companies to recall 11,000 kilograms of improperly labelled French horse meat that was turned into food products in the Netherlands.

However, the country’s economic affairs ministry said the food had been delivered via Belgium to the Netherlands between January and October and had probably been consumed.

The meat was improperly labelled as beef and was not fit for human consumption, the ministry said in the letter to parliament.

The recall in the Netherlands follows the arrest last month of 21 cattle traders, butchers and veterinarians in France on suspicion of illegally selling 200 horses from the sports and pharmaceutical industries.

The horse meat trading scandal first broke last January when horse DNA was found in frozen burgers sold in Irish and British supermarkets and involved traders and abattoirs from Romania to the Netherlands.

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The Dutch said the decision on the latest recall was taken in late December after a notification was received from the European Commission’s Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed.

There was no explanation of the gap between notification and recall, but the Dutch parliament was in recess in late December.

The Dutch food safety board was attempting to trace the meat “and has contacted the companies involved and requested that they pull the meat from the market,” it said.

“They will request that their clients pull the products from the stores if that is possible.”

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If you do not want the reason for the Recalls to even be more Dire then we need to stop America’s horses coming from the Mexico and Canada plants to enter into the food chain with further consequences. There is Absolutely NO tracibility on those horses vet care, or what they were used for, in America they do testing that is dangerous too and you cannot afford for those horses to be in your food chain, let alone the impact of Bute and other products combined together. America has defunded the horse slaughter but its still lingering
in Mexico and Canada and those ARE American horses going through there!